Carney Derangement Syndrome has struck again, this time felling National Journal's Ron Fournier, who took to MSNBC's Morning Joe to deliver a measured criticism of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney Friday morning. Carney is taking heat from reporters over his insistence that a recently-released email about then-Ambassador Susan Rice's Sunday show prep was not about Benghazi, but about broader unrest in the Muslim world. Fournier's way of calling the White House's rationale thin was to equate Carney to "Baghdad Bob."

Carney Derangement Syndrome has struck again, this time felling National Journal's Ron Fournier, who took to MSNBC's Morning Joe to deliver a measured criticism of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney Friday morning. Carney is taking heat from reporters over his insistence that a recently-released email about then-Ambassador Susan Rice's Sunday show prep was not about Benghazi, but about broader unrest in the Muslim world. Fournier's way of calling the White House's rationale thin was to equate Carney to "Baghdad Bob."

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Carney Derangement Syndrome has struck again, this time felling National Journal's Ron Fournier, who took to MSNBC's Morning Joe to deliver a measured criticism of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney Friday morning. Carney is taking heat from reporters over his insistence that a recently-released email about then-Ambassador Susan Rice's Sunday show prep was not about Benghazi, but about broader unrest in the Muslim world. Fournier's way of calling the White House's rationale thin was to equate Carney to "Baghdad Bob," the Iraqi Minister of Information who kept insisting that the 2003 American invasion was but a scratch.

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Fournier told Scarborough and company that although he "has admired Jay and worked with Jay, and wants my White House to succeed," he thought it was "painful yesterday, watching that briefing and get Baghdad Bob flashbacks."

Way Too Early host Thomas Roberts took a shot at injecting some reality into the proceedings, pointing out that the widespread protests in the region at the time were a huge story, and a cause for significant worry going into that weekend, but was quickly cut off by Joe Scarborough, because that's how Morning Joe works.

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The controversy over this most recent email, at least in the minds of non-deranged reporters, isn't so much over whether the new email reveals anything, but whether the White House should have released it along with the others it gave to Congress (and released publicly to refute the fabricated reporting of Jon Karl and Sharyl Attkisson). Carney was repeatedly asked why, if the new email wasn't about Benghazi, was it then included in a FOIA request for documents related to Benghazi, and he explained that the latest FOIA request was handled by the State Department, not the White House.

If the new email doesn't reveal anything new (which it doesn't), then it should matter very little why it was not included with the others, but it's still a legitimate question. The very worst you could say about it is that the White House may have been aware of the Rhodes email, felt some concern that it might be misused in exactly the way it has been, and constructed Carney's rationale in order to exclude it. That's the very worst conclusion you can draw, that the White House had a completely legitimate concern, and dealt with it using a legitimate, if thin, rationale.

That doesn't make the new email suddenly mean something, and sorry, it doesn't equal "Baghdad Bob." Even making that comparison, given the shit-ton of misinformation that the Bush-era White House press enabled around that specific war, is offensive.

If anything, all of the White House emails that have been released on this subject are remarkable in their lack of political consideration, given the fact that republicans didn't even wait for the shooting to stop before they leapt to politicize it. Given the blistering, cynical, and dishonest political assault they were under, it would have been entirely legitimate for those considerations to have been discussed, and yet they were not. History has borne out that it would have been legitimate, because the politics surrounding this, abetted by reporters who have humored it, have legitimately hindered efforts to actually deal with what happened in Benghazi.

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White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, not surprisingly, has few fans among the conservative media, but for most of his tenure, has managed to avoid the sort of unhinged reactions that his predecessor, Robert Gibbs, provoked. This week, though, a charming little style-section profile in Washingtonian Mom set the conservative blogs frothing over everything from Carney's apparently overflowing pantry, to his magical book collection, to his home podium setup, but most of all, his... anti-Nazi decorations? Why do conservatives love Nazis?

As we near the anniversary of the first fake #Benghazi email scandal, version 2.0 was again a hot topic of discussion at Monday's White House daily briefing. Press Secretary Jay Carney even referenced the "emails" that ABC News' Jon Karl said he had "obtained" last year (which turned out to be spoon-fed Republican paraphrases of emails) in casting the scandal as a "partisan effort," but when challenged directly about Karl's bad reporting, said "Our interest, really, is not in playing that game."

There were some, alas, who attempted to move the goalposts by suggesting to White House Press Secretary Jay Carney that the real measure of success is how many of those enrollees were previously uninsured, a number that is conveniently uncertain.

There was a lot of big news on Friday, but none bigger for The Daily Banter's White House beat than the resignation of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, and the naming of Principal Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest as Carney's replacement. We've got exclusive analysis of Carney's resignation by some of the reporters whom he'll be leaving behind, plus what we can expect from Earnest, who will accompany President Obama on his European trip next week.

At Thursday's White house Daily Briefing, the second day of Benghazi Emails 2: Electric Boogaloo proceeded apace, with Press Secretary Jay Carney fielding questions from reporters on a newly-released email that Benghazi cultists insist proves that the White House engaged in a politically-motivated cover-up. At one point, though, Carney turned the tables by asking Fox News' Ed Henry a question that Henry couldn't, or wouldn't, answer.

ABC News' Jon Karl has made the effort to create a Benghazi scandal a personal hobby horse, even going so far as to falsely report that he had "obtained emails" that he, in fact, had not. At Wednesday's White House Daily Briefing, Karl tried to resurrect the scandal again by confronting Press Secretary Jay Carney over a recently released White House email (this one was real). Things got heated over the course of the eight minutes, as Carney pushed back hard at Karl, even taking a veiled shot at Karl's fabricated reporting.

Reporters from Fox News and ABC News double-teamed Press Secretary Jay Carney using a right-wing study of an apparent White House gender pay gap, and CNN stuck the dismount by carving out the section of Carney's answer that seemed to validate that talking point. On Saturday morning's Melissa Harris-Perry show, host Melissa Harris-Perry demonstrated how the same tactic can be used from the left by accusing Jay Carney of "mansplaining" the gap, and similarly clipping his response to suit her narrative.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has been taking shots at the legitimacy of John Boehner's Select Committee On Hashtag #Benghazi since it was announced, but on Friday afternoon, gave what has been the clearest indication, so far, that the White House would be perfectly fine with Democrats in Congress passing on the chance to participate. MSNBC's Kristen Welker asked Carney, directly, if Democrats should cooperate with the Select Committee, and Carney's response was not subtle.